Pankaj Mishra

In an article published on March 19, 2018 in the New York Review of Books titled “Jordan Peterson & Fascistic Mysticism,” Mishra came under fire for disparaging racial comments aimed at a friend of clinical psychologist and best-selling author Jordan Peterson. Mishra wrote that Peterson’s friendship with Charles Joseph, a native member of the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe in Canada, “may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage.” Mishra did not receive public backlash from his employers, to the surprise of many readers, and has remained silent on the article. Peterson’s fiery response via Twitter went viral, revealing a political double-standard concerning even grievous matters including racial epithets.

In March 2014, Yale University awarded Mishra the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize.

In 2011, after Mishra accused Niall Ferguson of racism in a review of his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books, Ferguson threatened to sue for libel.

He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007–08 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. In November 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. In February 2015, Prospect nominated him to its list of 50 World Thinkers.

Mishra's anthology of writings on India, India in Mind was published in 2005. His writings have been anthologised in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (2004), and A History of Indian Literature in English (2003), among many other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB Classics), Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Penguin) and R. K. Narayan’s The Ramayana (Penguin Classics). He has also introduced two volumes of V.S. Naipaul’s essays, The Writer and the World and Literary Occasions.

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfilment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. This novel, with some autobiographical strains, is a bildungsroman. The narrative begins with the nineteen year old protagonist Samar coming to the city of Varanasi from Allahabad. A large part of the novel, including its end, is set in Varanasi. Gradually, he realizes that the city is a site for mystery. In his quest for knowledge, Samar moves from place to place, but in the closing section he comes back to the city for the last time. Thus, the narrative ends where it had begun. His book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia. Mishra's book From the Ruins of Empire (2012) examines the question, he says, of "how to find a place of dignity for oneself in this world created by the West, in which the West and its allies in the non-West had reserved the best positions for themselves."

Pankaj Mishra (born 1969) is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction.